


Scenes from the Wonderful, Fabulous Life of Diana Holland

by orphan_account



Category: Historical RPF, Luxe Series (Anna Godberson)
Genre: Death, Disability, Multi, Polyamory, Post-Canon
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-12-19
Updated: 2011-12-19
Packaged: 2017-10-27 13:47:26
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,891
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/296510
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orphan_account/pseuds/orphan_account
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The further adventures of Diana Holland, pioneering journalist. Spoilers for the entire Luxe series.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Scenes from the Wonderful, Fabulous Life of Diana Holland

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Telesilla](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Telesilla/gifts).



After the languor of Cuba, Paris is bracing.  Diana feels good about where she is, who she is.  She moves from café to café, the wind ruffling her hair (she just knows it will never be long again), the rain smelling like freedom.  She only thinks of Henry when she wants to shake her head over youthful folly.  She’s already learned so much, and the world is huge, waiting to teach her more.  She’s just as greedy as Penelope, but what she craves are experiences, not baubles or status.

 

She does get status.  In Paris, she’s known as the fearless American journalist who can, and will, talk to anyone.  She interviews clochards and socialites, policemen and waiters and their wives.  Their words pour through her and onto pages she sends back to America.  America sends money to her, and money is the world’s rubric for success.  And it buys absinthe.

 

As some of the Green Fairy’s faithful adherents descend into madness, Diana’s grateful that she only occasionally indulged.  But the feeling it gave her, from the sight of green melting into white sugar to the inevitable crash, was almost-just-not-quite worth risking madness.

 

Isadora is worth risking madness.  The first time Diana sees her dance, she thinks of cutting off her hair, of dressing like a man, of launching her entire career for a love that turned out to be fleeting.  Now her career is her love.  But the first time Diana and Isadora make love, she wonders if her career should be her only love.  Not that she wants to be with Isadora forever, but with Isadora it’s not fraught with tension, it’s not transactional.  It’s about feeling good.

 

For six months delirious months in Rome, Diana lives with Lina.  Lina is fiery, beautiful, passionate, but mercurial to the point of madness.  It stops being about feeling good, so Diana moves on.  Later, when she hears about Lina and the Duse, Diana wonders if this could possibly have a happy ending.  She’s sad but not surprised when it doesn’t.

 

Diana starts collecting stories and opinions about royalty.  She’s fascinated by European royalty.  Having been an American princess, she thought she had seen the worst of what unlimited wealth and privilege could do to a person.  In Russia, in Germany, in Romania, in Greece she learns that America has nothing on Europe.  She reports what people are saying with a neutral eye, but still she gets letters that aren’t always very nice.

 

In Athens, after ouzo in the Plaka, Diana learns something important about herself.  Dressing like a man, though she obviously isn’t one, drinking like a man, laughing out loud, teeth showing, gets her shoved up against a wall in an alley, giggling until Constantine covers her mouth and whispers, almost growls, “It’s better if you sound like a man.  A boy.”  When he takes his hand away she giggles again, just at the thought of what they’re going to do, how they’re going to do it, that anyone could see, but then she forces herself to be quiet and nods solemnly at Constantine.  Then she makes her voice husky and only gives him moans and grunts as he shifts her body around his, bracing her roughly against the wall, and tells her, over and over, what a beautiful boy she is.  She feels everything with every molecule, and looks up at the sky.  The stars shine down on her, and she feels as beautiful as Constantine tells her she is, and it’s not drunk sex in an alley: she _is_ Constantine’s beautiful boy and she loves that giving him this forbidden fantasy makes her pleasure that much sharper.  The experience is so powerful that she’s not sure she will ever have its like again.  She’s not sure she wants to.

 

She does have it again, many years later, with Polly and Henry; not her Henry, or more to the point the Schoonmaker’s Henry, but rather a more daring version of him.  It’s complicated with them.  They’re from Diana’s world, but younger, and the world around them has changed, destroyed by war, improved by the new tools and toys being patented every day.  Henry will pick her up and manhandle her against a wall, whispering crudities and endearments until they’re all a blur, Polly looking on with avid greed.  Polly manipulates her mind just as easily, with loving insults and stinging compliments, harsh kisses and soft touches.   It’s all something Diana would have thought she’d be immune to.  Both of them make her feel shockingly good, but Diana disentangles herself just as Polly contemplates renaming herself Clytoris.   Diana thinks back to Lina and the way her personal life was first and foremost a political statement, and leaves for chaotic, broken Germany.  Eventually, Polly does change her name, but to Caresse.  Diana, however uncharitably, can't help but think she's dodged a bullet.

 

It’s not all about sex; in fact, sex is only a small part of Diana’s hugely exuberant life.  She can go for months, even years, barely thinking about it at all.  She’s in Spain, but doesn’t climb into anyone’s sleeping bag, and the earth moves for her politically, not sexually.  She feels safer giving herself to writing than to another person; she can’t imagine writing ever letting her down.

 

She spends the second Great War doing what she can.  It’s so little compared to everything that’s so wrong, but it’s finally over and she runs away from broken Europe.  She had seen so much death there, but it’s the painful new births that drive her away, finally make her feel old. South Africa seems far enough, but they seem determined to pursue a course that will only lead to more pain.  She crosses the South Atlantic to study the vitality of Argentina.  The government is crazy, drunk with power and sudden wealth.  She interviews Eva, and can’t help but think of Carolina.

 

She feels good.  She learns to tango.  The Spanish around her isn’t quite like it was Cuba, or in Spain, but it’s familiar and beautiful.  One day, part of her usually reliable body is numb.  She cries out in the street, and wakes up in the hospital.  She tries to ask the doctors what’s wrong, but their replies make no sense, and they indicate that she’s making no sense either.  She asks if anyone can speak to her in English.  She catches a brief glimpse of panic and pity on one doctor’s face just before he makes her understand that they _have_ been speaking English.

 

She can’t talk, and she doesn’t really understand the words people say to her, but she can still read and write.  She goes back to New York, and she sees promise all around her.  It’s a world removed from where she grew up. Elizabeth and Teddy are kind and so happy in their life together, but Diana doesn’t really want their Old World incomprehension.  She considers moving south, where she can be warm, but a single, disastrous month in Alabama reminds her of South Africa.  She goes west, taking the train, wondering how her sister felt when she went west so many decades ago.

 

She goes to Los Angeles, remembering the stories Julia had told of Pasadena and San Marino.  Julia and Paul visit her; she hasn’t seen them since the cloak-and-dagger days of the war.  Julia sits in her kitchen while they wait for brioches and soups to become themselves, writes her a note.  _You need gin and red meat and then more gin_.  Diana writes back, _You’ll go far, giving out responsible advice like that!_   Diana is not at all surprised when Julia does.

 

Eventually, Diana hires a companion.  Mary has escaped the South.  She wants to be an actress, but right now the screens are too small to have room for people who look like Mary.  _Be patient.  You will get there_ , Diana writes to her.  Mary doesn’t entirely believe her, especially once the assassinations start, but Diana has lavishly unwarranted faith.  Mary teaches her shorthand, and the two have long, silent conversations back and forth about everything and nothing, filling up endless cheap six inch by nine inch steno pads with their furious thoughts.   Diana is glad to be proven right when Mary leaves her for increasingly steady jobs. 

 

The newspaper tells her it’s morning in America, but Diana knows it’s much later than that for her.  She sits outside, the smell of orange blossoms taking her back to a dozen weddings from her childhood.  The sun feels like it did in Cuba, in Greece, in Argentina that last morning before speech left her behind.  Mary comes around when she can, but being a ballsy, groundbreaking detective on a hit show is time consuming.  Mary has scripts sent over so Diana can read along while she watches Mary’s show.  The show isn’t using even a tenth of Mary’s talent, so sometimes Diana goes to see Mary on the stage, carrying a copy of the play with her.  Seeing Mary’s work electrifies her.

 

Not long before the peaceful end, Diana makes sure that Mary has all their steno pads.  She signs papers giving Mary permission to use them however she wishes.  She hopes there’s something in those seemingly innocuous notebooks that somebody, somewhere will find useful.  She’s learned a lot, and she’d like to pass that along.

 

Wire service report, December 18, 1984:

  _Noted journalist Diana Holland died at her home in Pasadena, California at the age of 101.  Born to a wealthy family in New York in 1883, Holland moved to Europe in the early 1900s.  Known for her ability to engage with people from all walks of life, Holland’s dispatches from Europe were widely read and praised.  Holland returned to the United States in 1955, after a stroke left her afflicted with aphasia.  She continued to write sporadically until her death.  Mary Dwight, an Emmy nominee for her series_ They Call Me Detective _, and a close personal friend of Holland’s, released a statement today.  “I have lost a great friend today, but I take comfort in knowing that Diana lived a long and happy life, and had no regrets.”  Holland’s will named Dwight as literary executor, but Dwight has not yet commented on rumors of unpublished works by Holland.  “It’s too soon to think about that,” was all Dwight had to say on the subject.  Holland never married and had no children._

 

 

Newshocker.com, May 22, 2013:

 

 

 _Noted documentarian Ken Burns has announced that his next project will be a multi-part series about American socialite and journalist Diana Holland.  Holland, who died in 1984, spent much of her life in Europe, reporting on conditions there before World War I, during the inter-war period, and during World War II.  Holland was also involved in intelligence gathering for the Allies in the Second World War.  After a stroke, she retired to Pasadena, where she employed noted_ _actress Mary Dwight as a companion while Dwight was trying to break into show business.  Holland’s stroke resulted in aphasia, and she and Dwight communicated primarily by shorthand.  Dwight, Holland’s literary executor, has given the notebooks they used to Burns.  “I trust him with Diana’s story,” she said.  “It’s important that people like Diana Holland, who was a real pioneer, have their stories told.”  The untitled project should be ready for distribution in 2015_.

**Author's Note:**

> Isadora Duncan was an out bisexual; Lina Poletti an out lesbian. Caresse (inventor of the modern bra and an extremely interesting person) and Henry Crosby were involved in at least one polyamorous relationship. Constantine Cavafy was gay. Basically, I'm not giving any historical figures sexual orientations they're not known to have had (although Cavafy might not have had sex with Diana no matter how much ouzo was involved. Julia McWilliams worked in intelligence gathering for the OSS in France during World War II and married Paul Child in 1946. Mary Dwight is an original character.   
> Diana’s combination of expressive and receptive aphasia is medically unlikely but not impossible; she might have had two separate strokes without realizing it, or suffered injury trauma when falling down in reaction to her first stroke.


End file.
